Metal Conditioners - do they work?

Aug 04, 2005 2 Replies
W

Hi all,



Have been doing some web research on oil Additives, and so far, only the class known as metal conditioners seem to have some technical merit.



There seem to be two processess, one which has been around for years.



Justice Brothers is probably the best known brand, but they are highly deficient in technical details.



Found a website from another company which explains the process:

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Basically, a chemical which bonds to the metal, and exposes the "slippery" side so that 2 metal surfaces don't actually touch.


The other "newer" one from Ukraine XADO , seems to be a little more "active" in the way it treats the metal surface:



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This bonds ceramic material to your metal



Anyone have *practical* good/bad experience with this stuff?



Regards, WS


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W

The base ingredient seems to be ZDDP (zinc dialkyldithiophosphate) or some variant.

It really works (TM), but does have environmental concerns, here is an article describing it's effects:

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(sorry, no pictures) This stuff is apparently found also in high quality Motor Oils in small quantities, and the caveat is that adding too much may reduce the effectiveness of your Catalytic converter.

The oil companies are looking, but they don't seem to have found anything better (from the article):

"Based on the work he has done over a 10-year period, Bancroft believes that it will be very difficult to find another antiwear additive as effective as ZDDP."

Not much data on xado itself, but cermet films seem to have been used in automotive racing applications for some time, here is a company doing this. These films need to be applied manually:

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From what I can surmise, the innovating that Xado seems to have done, is to make the above process "automatic" (and cheap), just by adding the ceramics to your oil. Hence, no need to dismantle the engine to apply this stuff.

Still haven't found much testimonials on the web.

WS

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H

If what I've seen about XADO is true, you wouldn't ever need to be concerned about wear. And if this was true XADO would be overwhelming the market by repairing oil burning engines through chemistry. Sounds too good to be true, more like snake oil to me.

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